Hickey Receives Young Investigator Grant to Support International Research Collaboration
Michaela Martinez
Funding from the HFSP will support Hickey and his collaborators investigate how different molecules direct cellular behavior
John Hickey, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, received an Early Career Research Grant from the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) for the project Coordination of cell consortia via soluble factors. Developed by the International Human Frontier Science Program Organization, the research award is intended to support innovative basic research that utilizes new and creative approaches to address long-standing biological questions.
Unlike traditional grants, the HFSP grant is only awarded to teams of researchers who are based in different countries and plan to combine their respective skills to answer questions that could not be addressed in a single lab.
Working with researchers in Spain and Germany, Hickey and his collaborators aim to understand how cytokines, growth factors and other small, soluble molecules, can direct cell behavior and influence how cells organize to form tissues and organs.
Assistant Professor of Biomedical EngineeringCells secrete molecules that affect their neighbors and can cause them to die, to proliferate, to move away from them, to recruit them, and a multitude of other behaviors. We know that these molecules act like signals for cellular communication, but there is limited research about how or why certain behaviors occur with many signals at once across multiple cell types.
With the support of the grant, the team is optimistic that their expertise in genetic engineering, computational modeling, spatial mapping and tissue engineering will enable them to begin answering these long-standing questions.
Dr. Franziska Blaeschke of the German Cancer Research Center, Germany, specializes in CRISPR-based technologies. During her phase of the experiment, Dr. Blaeschke will engineer cells to secrete a variety of molecules of interest. These cells will them be introduced into a tumor model, where they’ll continuously produce the molecules as they move through the cellular environment.
Next, Hickey will utilize his lab’s multiplex imaging technology, which allows researchers to attach color-coded antibodies to the surface proteins on cells. Because different types of cells will express different surface proteins, researchers are left with a colorful––and informative–– image of tissue. He will also create particles to release molecules in a controlled fashion, complimentary to Dr. Blaeschke’s approach.
Finally, Xavier Rovira Clavé, a researcher at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Spain, has developed an experimental barcoding technology that will allow the team to essentially attach barcodes to the different cellular and color combinations they’ll see in the images of tissues. “We’ll be able to map how and where the cells are organized, so we can say ‘the cell that Dr. Blaeschke engineered secretes this molecule, which we can see recruits these cells around it or causes them to move away,’” said Hickey.
The HFSP will provide the team with $1.2 million in funding over three years. The team will use this support and their respective technologies to study how immune cells organize and coordinate cellular activity in healthy and tumor models.
“We’re hopeful that the approaches we explore will help us develop an experimental framework to go beyond these basic science questions,” said Hickey. “Ideally this is the foundation to get us to understand how to engineer cells to secrete molecules and other perturbations that can be used as therapeutics to treat different diseases.”